THEATRE REVIEW

JANUARY 2026 | Volume 259

 

You wouldn’t know it from his name, but Adrian Glynn McMorran is Ukrainian on his mother’s side. Juno Award-nominated actor/singer-songwriter/musician wrote and performed an album with his folk band The Fugitives about his Ukrainian grandparents. He has now adapted the album, You’re Just a Place That I Know, for the stage in what he calls “a theatrical concert.” The Arts Club was wise to include it in its season. With crisp direction by Marcus Youssef, the show is beautiful and moving, a testament to Canada’s cultural mosaic and to some of the ways our ancestry shapes us.

McMorran partly narrates his Baba’s and Dido’s stories but mostly performs them in a suite of songs. He sings, plays guitar and piano, and is accompanied by a five-piece band: Marlene Ginader violin, Cat Hiltz bass, Martin Reisle cello, guitar and balalaika, Sally Zori drums and Chelsea Rose Winsby vocals. He has somehow also gathered an 18-piece choir to sing background, Adam Kozak, conductor.

Beverly Dobrinsky opens with remarks about her own Ukrainian heritage and sings a song in Ukrainian. The show is punctuated by different band members telling their ancestral stories in powerful counterpoint to the music. Especially smart and moving are drummer Zori’s story about recognizing the queer community as having shaped him (“ancestry is so much more than genetics”), and Winsby’s story and gorgeous song (“Touch the Ground”) about coming to terms with the grandmother she hated when growing up, a residential school survivor “deemed unfit” to care for her eleven kids.

Eight other songs make up the through-line of the show, beginning with Adrian’s teenage grandmother being kidnapped from her village by Nazi soldiers, progressing through her meeting and marrying Adrian’s grandfather in a Displaced Persons camp in Austria after the war, their emigration to and life in Montreal, her motherhood, love for her husband, farewell to him at his death, and Adrian’s own farewell to her at hers.

The songs are eloquent and beautifully arranged, performed and played, from quiet, poignant ballads to exultant rockers. McMorran is a fine guitarist with a relaxed stage presence and a lovely voice that sometimes drifts into falsetto. He’s also a wonderful lyricist:

When I close my eyes, there’s a vision of gold
Clouds melt from the sky like meat off the bone
All from a dream of when I was young
All from a dream

As their ship approaches Montreal, his grandfather wonders what will be:

I’m standing on my years of youth to try to see what’s coming to me
And I’m burning like a secret with all the in-betweens
The best things always wait

Grandmother sings to grandfather about their growing old together:

I only wanna count in our time
I only want our dreaming to rhyme

The choir gives the songs so much size and weight.The haunting final song, “Generations,” is sung by the entire band and choir, partly in Ukrainian.

I loved this show.

 

 

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